Wallpaper That Emits Light

You've heard of the incandescent light bulb, and the compact fluorescent light bulb, and the LED light bulb. How about a source of light that isn't a bulb, but an entire wall that emits light?

LOMOX, a company that develops OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) technologies, has built OLED materials that could be coated onto a film, which could in turn be attached to a wall. This would turn the entire wall into a light source.

A light source that emits natural-looking light with a brightness of 150 lumens/watt.

The film would consume just 3 to 5 volts of electricity, which means you could power it with a battery. LOMOX says it has overcome a major drawback of OLED technology: short product lifetimes.

The company expects its lighting technology to reach the market in 2012.

Via GlobalSpec.

Solar Cells Made From Common Substances

From CNET's Green Tech: Researchers at IBM have written a paper describing a solar cell made from common materials like copper, zinc, tin and sulfur or selenium (CZTS).

Conventional silicon and thin-film solar cells are made from scarce or expensive materials that limit production capacity and improvements, according to IBM. Solar cells made from abundant elements have no such cost or production constraints.

The cells IBM describes convert only 9.6% of the solar energy falling on them into electrical energy. While this is 40% higher than what CZTS solar cells have achieved to date, it's far lower than the efficiencies of polysilicon and even thin-film solar cells.

However, IBM's cells use only small amounts of material. If the cells' efficiency were pushed up to 12%, they would be commercially viable alternatives to current products.

Marines Target Solar Energy Development on Front Lines

In remote battle locations, electronic devices used for communications and targeting run on electricity from generators. Transporting fuel to these places is risky and expensive. The Navy is therefore focusing on renewable energy to power computers in the field.

During the first quarter of this year, the Navy will start procuring renewable power systems made up of solar panels and rechargeable batteries. Known as the Ground Renewable Expeditionary Energy System (Greens), it can provide an average continuous output of 300 watts of electricity, with peaks of up to 1 kW.

According to the report in Defense Systems, that's enough to power most of the essential communications and targeting electronics that Marine forces would need in remote locations.

Last October, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus announced five energy goals through the year 2020. One of the goals is to ensure that by the end of the next decade, at least 40% of the Navy's total energy consumption comes from alternative sources.

How Nuclear Power Works

A hyperboloid cooling tower at a nuclear power plant. The tower transfers excess heat from the water to the atmosphere.

A nuclear power plant generates electricity by heating water to produce steam, which drives a turbine. The heat is created by splitting uranium atoms.

Uranium is the heaviest naturally-occurring atom in nature. Its nucleus has 92 protons and, in its most common form, 146 neutrons, giving it a mass number of 238. It is indicated by the symbol ²³⁸U₉₂, or just ²³⁸U. For our purposes, we'll refer to it as U-238.

Over 99% of uranium is U-238. Another 0.7% of the element is of a form (or isotope) that has not 146 but 143 neutrons. This is U-235, and is of chief interest to us, because this is the form that can be split manually and that discharges heat on splitting.

Uranium extracted from the earth must be enriched until it contains 2% to 3% of U-235. (Weapons-grade uranium is enriched to 90% U-235.)

The U-235 is placed in a container in a nuclear reactor, where it absorbs neutrons. On being hit by a free neutron, the uranium atom splits into two smaller atoms (typically krypton and barium) and releases two to three neutrons and a huge amount of energy as heat. This event is known as fission.

Each U-235 atom that undergoes fission releases 200 million electron volts, or MeV, of energy. Now 1 MeV is extremely tiny, so tiny you would never feel it. But one gram of U-235 has 2,562,553,191,489,360,000,000 atoms. When all those atoms split, the electron volts emitted add up to a lot of energy (you do the math!). Actually, one gram of U-235 produces the same amount of energy as 5.16 tons of TNT.

Obviously, we can't have that. The fission of uranium must be controlled. Fortunately, there's a way to do that.

Ordinary water, heavy water or graphite are used to slow the neutrons down, and rods of cadmium or barium are inserted into the container to absorb neutrons and thus control their concentration.

As a result, all that fission energy is safely channeled toward making steam, which powers the turbine, thereby generating electricity.

And if you live in Connecticut, know that about 38% of your electricity comes from nuclear power.

Renewable Energy Industry Groups Urge Stronger U.S. Renewable Energy Standard

CEOs representing renewable energy companies in the U.S. released on Feb. 4, 2010, a study (pdf) that showed increasing our renewable electricity standard to 25% by 2025 would support 274,000 jobs.

The study was released by RES Alliance for Jobs, a coalition of businesses and organizations that support Congressional enactment of a strong federal Renewable Electricity Standard (RES).

Battery Than Can Produce Utility-Scale Power

Think of an aluminum plant running in reverse, generating electricity instead of consuming it.

That's the concept behind a new stationary battery large enough to produce utility-scale power, a technology being developed by MIT Professor David Sadoway.

The battery produces power by making a sandwich out of 2 layers of liquid metal alloy with a layer of a salt in between, and then placing the entire sandwich in an electrolyte. Ions flow from one metal layer through the electrolyte to the other layer, generating electricity. The whole system is maintained at 700° C.

Sadoway's project has already received a grant of nearly $7 million over 5 years from the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E. Soon after that, the French oil company Total announced a $4-million research agreement with MIT to jointly develop a smaller version of the battery.

In its press release announcing the grant for the battery (along with names of other grant recipients), ARPA-E said:

If successful, this battery technology could revolutionize the way electricity is used and produced on the grid...

Massive Gains Possible from Energy Efficiency, Says McKinsey & Co.

There is a McKinsey report out that shows the potential savings of non-transportation energy in the U.S. simply through efficiency.

According to the report, we could (emphasis mine):

reduce annual non-transportation energy consumption by roughly 23 percent by 2020, eliminating more than $1.2 trillion in waste – well beyond the $520 billion upfront investment (not including program costs) that would be required. The reduction in energy use would also result in the abatement of 1.1 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions annually – the equivalent of taking the entire U.S. fleet of passenger vehicles and light trucks off the roads.

For a pdf copy of the report's executive summary, click here.

For the full 165-page report, click here.

Sustainable Packaging Using Bioplastics

Just about everything we buy is covered in plastic packaging at some stage of its production cycle. With oil prices rising and consumer demand for sustainable packages growing, companies are turning their attention to packaging made out of bioplastics.

The benefit of bioplastics is, of course, that they degrade in the environment.

As the video below explains, bioplastics can be made from a range of plants such as sugarcane, wheat, tapioca, potato and soy.

Using vegetable products in packaging, however, means they have to be diverted from the food supply — which could lead to food shortages and higher prices. So chemical manufacturers are also looking into making bioplastics out of agricultural waste.

Plastic Solar Cells Provide Light in Villages Lacking Electricity

Photovoltaic solar cells have long been seen as the most efficient source of inexpensive lighting in rural villages that lack electricity.

Now a scientist at Denmark's Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy has built a lamp made of a flexible plastic sheet on which are embedded a photovoltaic (PV) solar cell, an LED light source, a lithium battery, a diode and copper circuitry.

The rectangular plastic sheet is about the size of an overhead-projector transparency (yes, they still exist). Snapping together the fasteners on two corners of the sheet results in a funnel-shaped structure that produces directional light.

The solar PV cell charges the lithium battery during the day so the battery can power the LED bulbs at night. The cell is made of organic polymers and carbon nanostructures. It is inexpensive to produce but converts only 1% to 2% of the energy falling on it to electricity.

Sure, the light is dim, but the price ($27 for now) is about half what a villager would pay for a year's worth of kerosene to fuel an existing lamp. Each plastic sheet/lamp would last for a year. After all, you can flex a plastic sheet only so many times before it cracks.

Frederik Krebs, the lamp's inventor, hopes to start selling them this year. The market consists of 1.5 billion people in villages in Asia, Africa and Latin America that don't have electricity. Many of these places are so inaccessible they may never be on the grid.

If you were wondering whether an ordinary battery-powered lamp might not cost less, the answer is no. The batteries would run out after about 20 hours, which means each customer would have to buy hundreds of batteries to keep the lamp lit for a few hours every night of the year.

Internet's Power Usage Could Be Reduced 99.9%

Smarter data coding could cut the energy used by the world's data networks 99.9% by 2015.

The New Scientist reports that Bell Labs has launched a coalition of information and communications industry experts called Green Touch. The consortium has the vision of "significantly reducing the carbon footprint of ICT [information and communications technology] devices, platforms and networks."

Smarter Coding Cuts Through Noise

Green Touch members have identified many approaches to cutting energy use by data communications networks:

• Today's networks use high levels of power to rise above the noise inherent in communications channels. Bell Labs plans to develop low-power networks by implementing a code that detects low-power signals and ignores the noise.
  
  
• An MIT engineer is looking at ways to bundle data traveling over similar routes, which will reduce traffic on trunk routes that consume large amounts of power.
  
  
• A professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia, will consider "ways to make modems and phones go into a sleep mode when not in use — but from which they can wake up quickly."
  
  
• Other efforts will focus on power savings in memory and displays, and on changing user behavior.

Generating the power for our telephone, internet and cell phone networks releases 300 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year, says the head of research for Bell Labs. That's equal to the emissions from 50 million cars, or one of every 5 cars registered in the U.S.

Imagine the reduction in air pollution if 99.9% of those cars — or 49.95 million cars — were taken off the road.